One day last spring, as Rudolph W. Giuliani ended a visit to Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn, the crucible of discipline that shaped his world view and helped propel him into public life more than 30 years ago, he reflected on the changes in manners, mores and standards that have transformed the New York he once knew.
Surveying a city in which the consuming educational debates centered on multiculturalism and condoms, the pressing public fear was collapse of order in the streets, and a million residents swelled the welfare rolls, he said, "I think one of the things that happened to us is we became so arrogant that we believed we could reconstruct everything."
Now as he takes office, the victor in a campaign to restore municipal services, teach the basics, punish the bad guys and honor the verities that he believes are eternal, Mr. Giuliani's words on the past failures of social policy ring differently. He has set such an ambitious agenda for himself, and approached it so aggressively, that questions linger on whether he is intent on reinventing the wheel.
The questions have particular currency because public perceptions of the Mayor's emerging public personality remain so sharply split.
Used to Contradictions
Is this former prosecutor, who has never held elective office, an apolitical Everyman, voicing the pent-up frustrations of middle-class New Yorkers of all races and backgrounds, and committed to helping the poor with "hands on" leadership? Or is he partisan and intemperate, comfortable with only a smallish circle of acolytes, and insensitive to differing opinions?
Mr. Giuliani has grown used to confronting such contradictions. The notion of him as hot-tempered became so ingrained that he apologized for having tried to quiet supporters who booed David N. Dinkins after Mr. Giuliani lost to him in 1989 by shouting "Shut up," only to learn much later that he never used such words. He and his backers complain that the crusading, hard-nosed image he built and burnished as the most prominent Federal prosecutor of his generation is accurate, but incomplete.
"What I'm sure New Yorkers know is that he's very smart," said Raymond B. Harding, the leader of the state Liberal Party and one of Mr. Giuliani's crucial political backers since 1989. "What they've learned, I think, since the election is that he's a very well-functioning executive. What they may not know yet, but will learn, is that he's deeply caring about the city and all its people."
What Mr. Giuliani has shown so far, in both his public career and the slices of his private life that he has revealed, is an enigmatic mix of soft and hard qualities, depending on the circumstances and the audience.
He is the 49-year-old man who says that the nuns and brothers who struck him to teach him were right to do so because he often deserved it, but confesses that he cannot touch his own rambunctious 7-year-old son, Andrew, the elder of two children from his marriage to Donna Hanover, the television journalist.
In Andrew's Pocket
"Have you seen him with his son?" Michael J. Petrides, one of the mayor's newly named special advisers, asked with a mix of fondness and shock. "You want to smack him sometimes, because there's no discipline at all. That kid owns him."
He is at once the self-confessed square who avoided the convulsive debates of his Vietnam generation, and the student leader who persuaded a cadre of crew-cut sports fans to join him in forming an opera club in an all-boys high school.
"I remember him coming over to me one day as a sophomore, and saying, 'I'm starting an opera club,' " said Peter J. Powers, his classmate, campaign manager and, now, Deputy Mayor. "I didn't know anything about opera, and still know very little, but the next thing you know, he had 10 or 12 of us in a room reading librettos and listening to records."
To his critics he is the zealous lawyer who trampled the civil liberties of defendants and stopped at nothing to advance his own fame. To his admirers he is the bold innovator who took on Wall Street, political corruption and the mob with tactics and vision that his predecessors and competitors failed to match.
'A Multidimensional Man'
"I don't think the media has portrayed him as he truly is," said Ron Silver, the actor, a supporter and master of ceremonies for the inauguration. "Anybody who spends any time with him realizes that this is not a very one-dimensional fascistic personality. There's a multidimensional man, with a tremendous amount of compassion, very vital, that likes living, feels very strongly about his family and has a tremendous amount of sensitivity to other peoples less fortunate than himself.
"What has been selected to be shown is a kind of Savonarola-ish quality that he may exhibit at times," Mr. Silver continued, referring to the dour 15th-century Florentine reformer who was burned at the stake. "But it is also job-related, running that office, and being a prosecutor."
Mr. Giuliani acknowledges that he helped create his own image, but last year he repeatedly endured the frustration of addressing audiences on 10 or 12 topics, only to have a listener complain that he had spent all his time on what he invariably refers to as "lore enforcement."
"That's the stereotype of me," he said, explaining one woman's reaction to a speech. "That probably gets a lot more emphasis in her mind than the five other things I talk about, even if I spend more time on the five other things. Once I gave a speech and didn't mention crime at all, and at the end of it, several people accused me of trying to run away from it."
A Yankee Fan in Flatbush
Rudolph William Giuliani has not run away from much of anything since he was born nine days before D-Day in 1944, the only child of Harold Giuliani, a tavern owner, and his wife, Helen, whom the Mayor refers to as the best teacher he ever had and who in recent years has lived in the same Upper East Side apartment building as his own nuclear family.
His childhood as a lone Yankee fan in the Dodger territory of Flatbush was memorialized last year in an early campaign advertisement, but his family moved to the Long Island suburbs when was 7. He returned to Brooklyn on a diocesan scholarship at Bishop Loughlin, taking the Long Island Rail Road to the Atlantic Avenue terminal, burying his nose in the newspaper, he once recalled, to seem grown up and keep bigger kids from pestering him.
He went on to Manhattan College in the Bronx, pondered becoming a missionary priest, but ultimately enrolled at New York University Law School, where he embarked on the path he has followed steadily upward since, starting as a self-styled "J.F.K. Democrat," then an independent and finally a Republican and the No. 3 official in the Reagan Justice Department and United States Attorney in Manhattan for six years.
Mr. Giuliani says that he has always been a flexible political figure whose aim is to blend the best of the past with the present.
Accepting the Right Change
"The society that's going to emerge, that's a better society than the one we have today, is one that takes the improvements that have been created -- more civil rights, more equal rights, though not yet a fully equal role for women -- I mean, those things are going to be part of our future," he said in one of several long interviews last year. "But it doesn't mean that because that's the case that we give up on lessons like honesty, and integrity, hard work as the key to success, education as the key to improving yourself."
Last year he overcame the missteps, lack of money and confusion that dogged his first race for Mayor and defeated Mr. Dinkins. Now he has to transfer those skills to governing.
"I make mistakes," he explained last year. "But I try very hard to learn. It's a lesson from my mother. She always said everyone makes mistakes, but it's the sign of intelligence not to make the same mistake twice."
